‘This is not a developing Third World nation. This is Europe’ — This is how some media commentators talk about European refugees vs. Middle Eastern refugees (hint: it’s full of hypocrisy)
Investigating possible war crimes in Ukraine
March 07, 2022
“Geopolitical terrorism. Pure and simple.”
That is how EU chairman Charles Michel describes the Russian shelling of Ukrainian cities.
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While Karim Khan, chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, says he’s seen enough to send a team of investigators to seek evidence of war crimes in Ukraine.
“I think the world is watching. The world expects better.”
Today, On Point: Bombing and encircling civilians in cities, indications that cluster bombs may have been dropped. Is Russia committing war crimes in Ukraine?
Guests
Jeffrey Edmonds, expert on Russia and Eurasia. Research scientist with the Center for Naval Analyses. Former director for Russia at the National Security Council. (@jeffaedmonds)
Richard Weir, researcher in the crisis and conflict division at Human Rights Watch. (@rich_weir)
Philippe Sands, professor of law and director of the Centre for International Courts and Tribunals at University College London. Author of East West Street. (@philippesands)
Jack Beatty, On Point news analyst. (@JackBeattyNPR)
Transcript: A Prosecutor’s Story Of The Nuremberg Trials
MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Back in 1947, a young prosecutor represented the United States in what was the most important war crimes trials of the 20th century. The Einsatzgruppen portion of the Nuremberg trials, the largest mass murder trial in history.
BENJAMIN FERENCZ: My name is Benjamin Ferencz. When I was 27-years-old, which was a long time ago, I was the chief prosecutor for the United States in one of the subsequent Nuremberg trials.
FERENCZ [Tape]: The case we present is a plea of humanity to law.
FERENCZ: Which tried and convicted 22 high-ranking Nazis of murdering in cold blood over a million people, mostly Jews and mostly in Ukraine.
FERENCZ [Tape]: We shall establish, beyond the realm of doubt, facts which before the dark decade of the Third Reich would have seemed incredible.
CHAKRABARTI: Benjamin Ferencz is now 101-years-old. He turns 102 on Friday, and he is the last living prosecutor for the Nuremberg trials.
FERENCZ: I found personally, I found the records of the special extermination squads known as Einsatzgruppen in Germany. Their assignment was to kill all the Jews in Europe.
FERENCZ [Tape]: We show that the slaughter committed by these defendants was dictated not by military necessity, but by that supreme perversion of thought, the Nazi theory of the master race.
FERENCZ: They sent a daily report back to headquarters in Berlin, listing which units A, B, C or D of the Einsatzgruppen were located where in Ukraine, for example. And how many people they had killed. When I totaled a million people murdered on a little adding machine, I went to Nurnberg from Berlin, where my headquarters were then located and said, We have to put on trial. They said, We can’t. The lawyers have already all been assigned. The Pentagon is not [doing anything] about this. We can’t get approval.
I said, you can’t let these people go. I have in my hand here a million people murdered. They’re not going to let those bastard get off. And he said, Well, can you do it in addition to your other work? I said, Sure. He said, OK, you do it. I ended up there as my first case. You say it takes a long time. It took me a long time, two days, two days. And I rested the prosecutor’s case, and I convicted all of them.
FERENCZ [Tape]: We shall show … the methodical execution of long-range plans to destroy ethnic, national, political and religious groups which stood condemned in the Nazi mind. Genocide, the extermination of whole categories of human beings as a foremost instrument of the Nazi doctrine.
FERENCZ: That was what we were trying to do, we tried to bring justice in place of vengeance. Because vengeance just begets more vengeance, and I made a specific point in the opening segment, Vengeance is not our goal.
FERENCZ [Tape]: Vengeance is not our goal. Nor do we seek merely a just retribution. We ask this court to affirm by international penal action the man’s right to live in peace and dignity, regardless of his race or creed.
CHAKRABARTI: Nuremberg set the standard for justice in the wake of unspeakable war crimes. Since then, much but not all of the world has joined, for example, the International Criminal Court in The Hague. But even there, as Ferencz acknowledges, successful prosecutions are exceedingly difficult and exceedingly rare, in part because of resistance from the very nations who fought to defeat the Nazis.
FERENCZ: But we can’t be defeated by the fact that there are some people who don’t believe in the rule of law. They believe in power, and they want to exercise it whenever they think it’s in their interest to do so. And they’re very sizable number of people. So it’s not something where everybody is of one mind. There are some people who believe in the rule of force, that’s what gets us into the current situation. The only hope really is law, not war. The three words: law, not war.
FERENCZ: Benjamin Ferencz. In 1947, he was just 27-years-old and the chief prosecutor for the United States in the Nuremberg trials. He’s 101-years-old now.
https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2022/03/07/war-crimes-putin-russia-ukraine-conflict-nato
http://democracynow.org – The recent ceasefire in Ukraine continues to hold after a shaky start, days after Secretary of State John Kerry publicly accused Russian officials of lying to his face about their military support for separatist rebels. The United Nations says the death toll from the nearly year-old conflict has topped 6,000. This comes as tens of thousands rallied in Moscow to honor the slain opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, who had accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of authoritarian rule.
“It’s fashionable in the United States and Britain to condemn Putin as some sort of distorted mind,” says Noam Chomsky, but he notes no Russian leader can accept the current Ukrainian move to join NATO.
He argues a strong declaration that Ukraine will be neutralized offers the path to a peaceful settlement. Watch the full interview with Noam Chomsky on Democracy Now!, and see many more interviews with him over the years: http://www.democracynow.org/appearanc…
WAR MADE EASY OR WILL CONGRESS STOP THE TOXIC AMERICAN DREAM: WAR WITH RUSSIA
Norman Solomon in War Made Easy: How presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death (2005) writes about the uselessness of The War Powers Act. Solomon posits that Daniel Ellsberg recounts that after a few years of working on Vietnam policies as a US government insider, he “realized something crucial: that the president’s ability to escalate, his entire strategy throughout the war, had depended on secrecy and lying and thus on is ability to deter unauthorized disclosures—truth telling—by officials.”
A deep dive into U.S. intelligence in Russia and beyond
March 08, 2022
The United States has made it clear: U.S. troops will not fight Russia in Ukraine because the risk of war spilling over into Europe and beyond is far too great.
But there is still a lot the U.S. government is doing behind the scenes. Leading up to Russia’s invasion, President Biden took the rare step of disclosing intelligence with sensitive details about President Vladamir Putin’s war plans.
Host Peter O’Dowd speaks with Amy Zegart, who previously served on the National Security Council and now teaches at Stanford University, where she’s chair of the artificial intelligence and international security steering committee. Her new book is called “Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence.”
This segment aired on March 8, 2022.
https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2022/03/08/us-intelligence-russia-ukraine
Norman Solomon posits that appearing on the CBS program Face the Nation in 1964. Wayne Morse objected when journalist Peter Lisagor told him: “Senator, the Constitution gives to the president of the United States the sole responsibility for the conduct of foreign policy.”
Senator Morse responded sharply. “Couldn’t be more wrong,” he broke in. “You couldn’t make a more unsound legal statement then the one you have just made. This is the promulgation of an old fallacy that foreign policy belongs to the president of the United State. That’s nonsense. ”When Lisagor prodded him (“to whom does it belong then, Senator?”), Morse did not miss a beat: “It belongs to the American people. And I am pleading that the American people be given the facts about foreign policy.”
The questioner persisted: “You know, Senator, that the American people cannot formulate and execute foreign policy.”
Morse became positively indignant. “Why do you say that? I have complete faith in the ability of the American people to follow the facts if you’ll give them. And my charge against my government is, we’re not giving the American people the facts.”
“It is a commonplace that ‘you can’t keep secrets in Washington’ or ‘in a democracy,’ that ‘no matter how sensitive the secret, you’re likely to read it the next day in the New York Times.’ These truisms are flatly false, Daniel Ellsberg wrote in 2002. “They are in fact cover stories, ways of flattering and misleading journalists and their reader, part of the process of keeping secrets, well. The overwhelming majority of secrets do not leak to the American public. This is true even when the information withheld is well known to an enemy and when it is clearly essential to the functioning of the congressional war power and to any democratic control of foreign policy.
“The reality unknown to the public and to most members of Congress and the press is that secrets that would be of the greatest import to many of them can be kept from them reliably for decades by the Executive Branch, even though they are known to thousand of insiders.”
When war backers want Congress to defer to presidential enthusiasm for sending troops into action, the repertoire of justification often includes references to the ultimate information and judgment residing in the White House. A week before the Gulf War began, the avowedly moderate Senator Warren Rudman was serving as a loyal Republican.
“The president’s personal relationships with the leaders of the allied states are unparalleled,” he said. “Having masterfully forged a fragile multinational coalition, he is the one who can best gauge it’s cohesion and durability.” On the same day, Senator Jesse Helms used the timeworn argument of “national interest,” saying that “the president has dispatched over 400,000 American military personnel to the Persian Gulf to protect the national interest. We must support the president in the course he has laid out.”
Playing follow the leader, many a member of Congress simply abdicates responsibility to the White House. Consider this statement by Democratic senator Joseph Biden on January 24, 1991, a week into the Gulf War: “Therefore, I believe, since I do not have any moral objection to what we are doing—I just thought it was less wise to do it this way than the way I preferred to do it—that it is my obligation to do all that I can to support the president and support the fighting women and men to the field. He is the commander in chief. We gave him the authority. We gave him the constitutional equivalent of a declaration of war. As the commander in chief, he is required to exercise that responsibility as he sees fit. I am not a military expert, and it would be presumptuous of me to suggest how that war, now that it is under way, should he conducted, and will not. I will follow his lead and judgment on that.”
In late May 1999, the president of the United States openly violated the War Powers Act—and the national media yawned.
The war powers law, enacted in 1973, requires congressional approval if the US military is to engage in hostilities for more than sixty days. As that deadline passed on May 25, 1999—while large-scale bombing of Yugoslavia continued—some members of the Hose spoke up.
“Today, the president is in violation of the law,” California Republican Tom Campbell said. “That is clear.” And Ohio Democrat Dennis Kucinich added, “The war continues unauthorized, without the consent of the governed.”
But sophisticated journalists in the nation’s capital just shrugged. To them—and to the Clinton administration—the law was irrelevant dark time of push-button warfare, with more and more eyes getting adjusted to shadowy maneuvers, it was possible to discern a pattern of contempt for basic democratic principles.
Forget all that high-sounding stuff in the civics textbooks. Unable to get congress to vote for the the ongoing air war, the president insisted on continuing to bomb Yugoslav cities and towns, destroying bridges and hospitals, electrical generators and water systems. Boasting of the Pentagon’s might, he pursued a Pax Technocratica with remote control assurance.
Attorney Walter J. Rockler, a former prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials more than half a century earlier, was outraged. On May 23, in an essay for the Chicago Tribune that cut against the prevalent media grain, he denounced “our murderously destructive bombing campaign in Yugoslavia.” He challenged what was being done in the name of Americans: “The notion that humanitarian violations can be redressed with random destruction and killing by advanced technological means is inherently suspect. This is mere pretext for our arrogant assertion of dominance and power in defiance of international law. We make the nonnegotiable demands and rules, and implement them by military force.”
With enormous help from mass media, the White House is routinely able to marginalize congress and the public on matters of war and peace. In effect, reporters and pundits depict top US officials as beleaguered experts whose jobs are difficult enough without intrusive pressures from commoners. The American people have served mostly as spectators while peace and war hang in the balance.
Congresswoman Lee cast the only vote against giving President Bush a blank check to wage war in the wake of 9/11.
Three days after 9/11, with a lone dissenting vote from Representative Barbara Lee, Congress passed a resolution that started: “The president is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or person he determined planned, authorized, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations on persons.” The attack on Afghanistan began a few weeks later.
Noting that “the scope was global, the time frame infinite,” Lee explained later: “Congress was not voting to declare war; or was voting to give almost unlimited authority to the president to pursue the perpetrators of September 11 and any of their supporters anywhere. I could not support such a broad, open-ended grant of war-making power.” But every other member of Congress went along with the blank check for war—an incomparably easier vote to cast. Of course, hundreds of them reserved the right to complain later that they had been grievously misled.
Democratic Congresswoman Barbara Lee of California was the sole vote against the authorization of military force after 9/11. She was the one in the 421-1 vote. Lee joins Mehdi Hasan to react to lawmakers’ calls for military intervention in Ukraine.
PROPAGANDA FOR WORLD WAR THREE IN EUROPE
Solomon declares that during the lead-up to the Iraq invasion, diplomatic feints were very important for media consumption—and for political cover on Capital Hill. Quite a few Democrats reluctant to vote for the war resolution but even more reluctant not to, hung their hats on the spurious pretense that the Bush administration would use the mid-October 2002 congressional resolution as a
bargaining chip at the diplomatic table.
Instead, George W. Bush’ team simply pocketed the chip and went on their way to war. With scant credibility, after the war was turning out badly under the political lights, some Democrats claimed that they’d meant for Bush to use congress’s resolution for diplomatic leverage instead of a green light to go ahead with invasion.
“The president’s ability to decide when and where to use America’s military power is now absolute,” Michael Kinsley observed as the invasion of Iraq ended in (temporary) triumph. “Congress cannot stop him. That’s not what the Constitution says, and it’s not what the War Powers Act says, but that’s how it works in practice.”
“There are no surprises over the hypocrisy and double standards of the US. #Kevork
Almassian Watch the full @moats TV show at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXA8O… | @GeorgeGalloway”
A DECLARATION OF WORLD WAR THREE FROM A FORMER AMBASSADOR
No one can possibly know for sure what Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin – who has launched a full-scale invasion of neighboring Ukraine – may do next. But how might Americans be forced to sacrifice in hopes of saving Ukraine’s fragile young democracy?
And will Putin’s weapons of warfare (cyber or nuclear) target the U.S. and the West? “Sunday Morning” senior contributor Ted Koppel talks with Russia experts Fiona Hill and Nina Khrushcheva (great-granddaughter of Nikita Khrushchev), retired Gen. Keith Alexander, and former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta.
A VOICE FROM A FOX IN SHEEP’S CLOTHING
Fox News host reflects on the U.S. response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine on ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight.
A BIOGRAPHY OF VLADIMIR SAVIOR OF ALL THE RUSSIAS
#CutTheClutter #Putin #Russia As Russia continues to pursue the Ukraine offensive, understand how Putin made Russia one of the most powerful countries in the world.
Watch episode 512 of ThePrint’s #CutTheClutter dated 3 July 2020, where Shekhar Gupta explains the unlikely rise of Russia, its leader Putin & breaks down his ideology.
Diplomats are trying to find an off ramp to Putin’s war in Ukraine
March 8, 2022 7:20 AM ET
Heard on Morning Edition
MICHELE KELEMEN Twitter LISTEN· 4:52
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Can anyone talk Russian President Putin out of his war in Ukraine? French President Macron and Israeli Prime Minister Bennett are trying. The U.S. says it gave Putin off ramps before the invasion. https://www.npr.org/2022/03/08/1085099884/diplomats-are-trying-to-find-an-off-ramp-to-putins-war-in-ukraine
In episode 953 of #CutTheClutter, Shekhar Gupta looks at the Russia-Ukraine situation through Andrei Kozyrev and Major General Mick Ryan’s thorough insights. We look at Putin’s rationality, military preparedness and likelihood of a nuclear attack as he takes over Ukraine one city at a time.
EUROPE
Ukrainians are on alert for Russian saboteurs trying to infiltrate their towns
March 8, 2022 5:08 AM ET
Heard on Morning Edition
LEILA FADEL LISTEN· 7:47
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Ukraine’s government is releasing video confessions from Russians who have been detained so far. Civilian-run checkpoints have been set up to keep an eye out for suspicious people. https://www.npr.org/2022/03/08/1085099891/ukrainians-are-on-alert-for-russian-saboteurs-trying-to-infiltrate-their-towns
“War destroys all systems that sustain and nurture life–familial, economic, cultural, political, environmental, and social,” Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges writes. “Once war begins, no one, even those nominally in charge of waging war, can guess what will happen, how the war will develop, how it can drive armies and nations towards suicidal folly.” In this urgent, unscheduled segment of The Marc Steiner Show, Marc talks with Hedges about the path that led to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and about his firsthand experience with the horrific, inhumane reality of war.
Chris Hedges is the former Middle East bureau chief of The New York Times, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and a columnist at ScheerPost. He formerly hosted the program Days of Revolt, produced by TRNN, and is the author of several books, including America: The Farewell Tour, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, and War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.
Tune in for new episodes of The Marc Steiner Show every Monday and Thursday on TRNN. Read the transcript of this interview: Pre-Production/Studio/Post-Production: Dwayne Gladden
Mearsheimer argues that the US and China are in a dangerous security competition, more perilous than the first Cold War. In essence, once China grew wealthy, a US-China cold war was inevitable. Had US policymakers understood this logic in the early 1990s, they would have tried to slow down Chinese growth and maximize the power gap between Beijing and Washington.
However, the US did the opposite: it pursued a policy of engagement, which aimed to help China grow wealthier – based on the assumption that China would become a democracy and a responsible stakeholder, which would lead to a more peaceful world. Instead of fostering harmonious relations between China and the US, engagement led to an intense rivalry.
Are Australia and the world in deep trouble? Absent a major internal Chinese crisis, Washington and Beijing are consigned to waging a dangerous security competition. Can we manage on the margins to prevent disaster?
John Mearsheimer is a professor of political science and international relations at the University of Chicago and author of The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001). He was a guest at the Centre for Independent Studies in 2019.
Host: Tom Switzer is executive director of the Centre for Independent Studies. #subscribe
AUTHOR INTERVIEWS
Law professor Kim Wehle’s latest book is ‘How To Think Like a Lawyer — and Why’
March 8, 2022 5:08 AM ET
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NPR’s A Martinez talks to Wehle about her book which offers tips for how you might be able to avoid some big legal bills if you’re ever involved in a lawsuit. She lays it out in a five-step process. https://www.npr.org/2022/03/08/1085099905/law-professor-kim-wehles-latest-book-is-how-to-think-like-a-lawyer-and-why
Malcolm Nance visits with Stephanie Miller every Wednesday. Malcolm is an American author and media commentator on terrorism, intelligence, insurgency, and torture. He is a former United States Navy Senior Chief Petty Officer specializing in naval cryptology.
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